Echelon (Nasdaq: ELON)’s third-quarter earnings call this week had plenty of good news: revenues of $43.8 million that beat out forecasts, booming utility sales, new opportunities in Brazil and China and a growing appetite in Europe for its smart grid gear.

Echelon launched its Edge Control System (ECoS) platform in September 2010 with Duke as a showcase client. The idea is to extend Echelon’s abilities in smart meters to other smart grid devices via its Edge Control Nodes (the physical devices that sit in the field), and then open up the platform that manages them all (ECoS) to third-party application developers.

One big challenge in the platform game is proving that the technology in question is robust and flexible enough to handle all the demands placed on it. In Echelon’s case, it insisted in a prepared statement that its Edge system performed well in field tests with Duke, and that performance wasn’t an issue in the cancellation.

In other words, when it comes to the Edge products, “Given the very recent regulatory decision that further delayed Duke's smart grid deployments outside of Ohio, it made sense for both companies to defer additional investment in a Duke-focused ECN until we have more visibility,” Echelon CEO Ron Sege said in Thursday’s earnings conference call. (I’d guess he was referring to the Indiana situation, though he didn’t specify that.)

While Echelon continues to seek North American clients for its Edge products, particularly for distribution automation purposes, that might not be its most promising market -- Echelon’s smart meters are popular in Europe, but Duke is its only U.S. customer right now.

Instead, Sege said Echelon would be focusing on “Europe and Latin American regions where we see more solid demands.” Echelon recently got its platform certified with Brazilian metering heavyweight ELO, which could offer it entrée into that country’s future 65-million-unit smart meter upgrade. Echelon’s also working with Chinese smart meter maker Holley Metering in an attempt to break into the murky yet potentially massive Chinese smart meter market.

Baird Equity Research lowered its price target for Echelon from $13 to $11 after the conference call, noting that the Duke cancellation, as well as higher-than-expected costs from two European smart meter deployments, were “near-term headwinds” for the stock. Still, it and other analysts reported that they saw potential in Echelon’s long-term growth in emerging markets, based on its technology and its current strategy of working with local partners to get that technology into the field.